During the winter months in New England, it’s obviously important to keep your home’s interior warm and comfortable. It also means insulating water pipes so that they don’t freeze and crack. It may even be necessary to heat up your car’s engine to prevent freeze-related damage.

But what about your gutters? What measures should be taken to ensure that they don’t fall victim to freezing as well?

The solution is the same one you use for your home, pipes, and vehicles: heat them up. New England residents like you can benefit greatly from heated gutters. How?

1. By allowing you to avoid the chore of breaking up ice blocks in gutters.

Nobody relishes the notion of bundling up and braving the winter cold atop a shaky ladder to chop up and scrape out solid blocks of ice that form in gutters. Not only is this difficult, energy-sapping work; it also exposes homeowners to potential ladder falls, which send tens of thousands of New Englanders to the emergency room each year. Heating up your gutters prevents these huge blocks of ice from forming in the first place.

2. By helping to inhibit ice dams.

When water in gutters freezes, it can form the foundation for ice dams on the edges of roofs. This leaves no room for melting ice or snow to flow into gutters and out through your downspouts. Instead, this water looks for other destinations — like those provided by leaks in your fascia, walls, or ceilings. But if your gutters are heated, ice won’t form inside them, leaving plenty of space for runoff water to flow where it is supposed to.

3. By avoiding excess weight on your gutters.

Those ice blocks are pretty heavy, and most guttering (especially gutters made from aluminum) aren’t built to handle the added weight. Over time, the ice can cause gutter sections to buckle, pull apart from the roof, or separate from each other — all of which lead to gutter system malfunctions. Heated gutters prevent liquid from turning into ice, so your gutters aren’t subjected to additional stress.

4. By preventing the formation of icicles.

Icicles may be pretty, but when they form on gutters, they can be dangerous. You never know when a large one will detach from a gutter and fall onto someone below and cause a significant injury. Even if they stay attached, the gradual dripping of water from icicles can pool on the ground and then refreeze at night, thus leading to a slip-and-fall hazard due to the resulting ice patch. But when gutters are heated, icicles won’t form on them to begin with.

5. By keeping debris out of gutters.

Heated gutter products like Heated Helmet not only warm the gutters themselves, but they also provide a barrier to repel solid debris like leaves, twigs, and other tree refuse. If this debris gets into gutters, it can form clogs to prevent runoff water from reaching downspouts as well as a foundation for gutter ice. Heated Helmet’s nose-forward design lets solid debris slide off onto the ground while permitting water to trickle into the gutters.

Moonworks is a certified provider of Heated Helmet in the New England area. So if you want to avoid the pitfalls of frozen gutters, contact Moonworks for a free estimate on the superior-performing Heated Helmet gutter protection system. Just call 1-800-975-6666 or fill out our form.